ARGO5

The human mind, although brilliant in many ways, often struggles to comprehend information in an intuitive sense. Like a machine, it may accept data without objection, yet fail to visualise what that data truly means. The senses may sometimes need knowledge wrapped up in parables before the human mind can see them clearly. 

Maybe this is why the word 'fiction' precedes the word ‘non-fiction’. A word which by definition means ‘not-real’ has earned its own identity, whereas facts are subject to being labelled ‘not, not-real’. A consequence of consciousness over computing.

Measurement provides a useful example.

There are two fundamentally different ways of describing the measurable world. The first is through universally accepted mathematical units (the metre, the litre, the gram). These allow extraordinary precision and make calculation possible, yet beyond a certain scale they become increasingly difficult to visualise. The mind accepts the number, but is unable to fathom it behind the eyelids.

The second method is considerably older and far less precise, yet often far easier to understand: Comparative units. They exchange mathematical accuracy for intuition. They exist not to calculate, but to comprehend. Not to think, but to feel. For example, it is easier to imagine that all the gold ever mined on Earth would occupy roughly six Olympic-sized swimming pools, than to try and visualise what 284,000,000 kilograms of gold looks like. The quantity is identical. Only the method of description changes.

Many familiar measurements began this way: An inch was once the width of a thumb. A hand was the standard unit for measuring the height of a horse or pony. A foot was a foot. A furlong described the distance a team of oxen could plough before needing to rest. Horse-power referred to the pulling force of one horse.

As knowledge advanced, so too did our comparisons: An astronomer may use the Astronomical Unit (AU), the average distance between the Earth and the Sun describing the vast distances within our solar system.

When the scale of observation increases, so does the scale of understandable comparatives. 

Mission Day - 115

Earth sits against the black backdrop of the universe. It is now 0.88 AU behind the shuttle, reduced to a bright turquoise point of light. The Argos shuttle continues its journey forward towards the main asteroid belt, 0.41 AU ahead, the broad band of rock and debris lying beyond the orbit of Mars. It is one of the Solar System’s two major asteroid regions, the other being the distant Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune.

Off the port side, the Sun has diminished to a smaller, harder disc at a distance of 1.93 AU. Its energy has fallen to roughly a quarter of its intensity at Earth, still sufficient to illuminate the ship but no longer dominant. Surfaces turned away from it vanish into absolute black. There are no gradients of shadow, no soft transitions. Only light, and its absence.

Hermes, the ship's computer, calculates arrival at asteroid 46610 on Mission Day 180. Relativity will alter the relationship between Argos's time and that of ground control, but only marginally. Time runs differently under gravity and velocity. At this distance, reduced gravitational influence causes the ship’s clock to run slightly faster, while its heliocentric velocity causes it to run slightly slower. Over the course of the journey, the effects nearly cancel. By arrival, the difference will amount to only a few hundredths of a second.

Twelve days earlier, Hermes rotated the vessel one hundred and eighty degrees. Since then, thrust has been applied opposite the direction of travel. The objective is not to stop, but to reduce the velocity difference between Argos and the asteroid ahead. In deep space, arriving too fast is as problematic as arriving too slow. The task is to match velocity at the moment of encounter. Decelerate too early and the journey lengthens. Too late, and the ship overshoots, or collides.

The vessel itself has a length and width comparable to an ocean container ship. It measures approximately three hundred and eighty metres long, built around a rectangular frame of trusses, radiator fins and layered machinery. It does not resemble a single, unified design. It appears instead as something modified, repaired and expanded over time, each addition bolted on as necessity demanded.

Its outer hull retains fragments of the dull iron-red coating typical of early mid-generation mining vessels. Much of it has been stripped away by radiation and high-velocity dust, exposing a patchwork of metal and composite beneath. Along the port side, the original name, CARGO 5, has been altered. The plated lettering has been cleaned, reworked and partially replaced during a series of extravehicular activities. The new metal catches the Sun sharply against the weathered hull. The revised name reads: ARGO5.

Cargo 5 belonged to the final era of crewed asteroid mining. Ships of its class spent years within the belt, extracting, processing and storing material before returning to Earth orbit. Crews rotated in cycles. Cargo was offloaded. The process repeated. It was effective, but slow, expensive and dependent on sustaining human life far from Earth. Most who signed on did so for wages high enough to justify the distance.

As remote systems advanced, that model changed. Ships no longer needed to return. Deep-space mining vessels like Cargo 5 were progressively upgraded. Living quarters were reduced, control systems relocated offboard and operations increasingly automated. Eventually, the vessel no longer required a crew, or a return trajectory at all. It remained in deep space, mining and refining material in situ.

Rather than transporting raw material, it began fabricating it. Extracted resources were processed onboard and formed into standardised cargo pods, each equipped with independent propulsion and guidance. These units were launched towards Earth autonomously, allowing the parent vessel to continue operating uninterrupted. Subsequent upgrades made the system increasingly self-sufficient. Cargo 5 could repair its own structure, replace damaged components and adapt its systems using the materials it processed. Over time, little of the original vessel remained unchanged. It was no longer a fixed design, but an accumulation of function.

The vessel had been inactive for over two years when Max Orpheus saw another use for it. He presented his proposal to ARCHON, the Aeronautical Research Centre for the Human Odyssey of all Nations. Formed following the dissolution of NASA and its international counterparts, ARCHON had consolidated the world’s major space programmes beneath a single organisation, pooling their infrastructure, research and resources. The cumbersome title was rarely spoken in full. To almost everyone, it was simply ARCHON.

Max’s proposal called for a new class of telescope, and a plan to repurpose Cargo 5 for one final mission. The concept utilised the ship’s existing architecture. Fabrication arrays, once used for cargo production, would be reconfigured to manufacture Panoptes modules, an evolutionary cousin of the telescope.

For most of history, a telescope was a single object. A tube, a lens, a mirror. Its ability improved with size: a larger opening collected more light and revealed finer detail. For centuries, progress was simple. If you wanted to see more, you built a bigger telescope.

By the late twentieth century, that approach reached a turning point with the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. By placing a telescope above Earth’s atmosphere, Hubble avoided distortion from air and weather, producing images far sharper than anything on the ground. But Hubble also made the limits clear. Some objects were too faint. Others were hidden behind dust. Some were simply too small in the sky to resolve. From this point, telescope design split in two directions.

One path focused on collecting more light and seeing through obscuration. This led to the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021. Webb uses a much larger segmented mirror and observes in infrared wavelengths, allowing it to see through dust clouds and detect extremely faint, distant objects. Where Hubble refined clarity, Webb extended reach.

The second path addressed a different problem entirely: resolution. In the early 2000s, Sheperd S. Doeleman and his team calculated what it would take to observe the shadow of a black hole. The result was extreme. It would require a telescope with an aperture comparable to the diameter of the Earth, far beyond the limits of any single structure.

Rather than attempting the impossible, they redefined the instrument, and the Event Horizon Telescope was conceived: a global network of radio observatories separated by thousands of kilometres and synchronised with atomic clocks. Operating together, these instruments formed a single virtual aperture spanning the planet. Their data was combined using a technique known as very long baseline interferometry, allowing astronomers to resolve details far beyond the reach of any conventional telescope. In 2019, the system produced the first direct image of a black hole.

More than a decade later, as energy production and storage transitioned away from fossil fuels, systems once constrained by planetary resources were increasingly replaced by renewable alternatives: wind, solar, geothermal and gravitational. Green hydrogen was produced at an industrial scale, providing a dense, transportable energy medium. Offshore electrolyser platforms harvested energy from wind and wave systems. The result was a continuous fuel cycle: seawater was split via electrolysis, the hydrogen pumped to shore for fuel, and after use it naturally recombined into water and returned to the sea. While not limitless, the system operated at a scale where fuel scarcity was no longer a practical constraint.

With energy no longer the dominant limiting factor, space travel began to shift from an exceptional undertaking to a routine operation, echoing the expansion of commercial aviation in the twentieth century. For the first time in its history, Earth had fewer strategic resources left to compete over. For many years there were no wars.

Technology was now evolving as quickly as curiosity. Within a few years, multiple stations had been established on the Moon’s surface. Alongside them was the Selescope. The name was derived from the Greek goddess of the Moon, Selēnē, combined with -scope, meaning “to observe,” forming “moon-observer” while deliberately echoing the familiar term telescope.

The Selescope represented an evolution of the Earth-based Event Horizon Telescope. Rather than a single instrument, it consisted of seventy-four distributed detectors arranged across the far side of the Moon. Operating as a coordinated interferometric array, the system achieved an effective aperture comparable to the diameter of the lunar hemisphere. Unlike the Event Horizon Telescope, which operated in the radio spectrum, the Selescope extended observation across a broad range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Detection, timing and reconstruction were distributed across the array. The final image was assembled from fragments gathered across the surface of the Moon.

Throughout the lunar month, the far side remained permanently shielded from Earth, providing complete protection from terrestrial radio-frequency interference, satellite transmissions and communication networks. Then, for approximately fourteen days of each twenty-eight-day lunar cycle, the Moon's own bulk also eclipsed the Sun. During this lunar night, the array operated in its quietest state, free not only from Earth's electromagnetic pollution but also from direct solar radiation and much of the Sun's radio noise. Combined with the absence of an atmosphere and artificial light, these periods provided some of the cleanest observing conditions anywhere in the Solar System.

The word telescope is not so much a name as a description of function. It derives from the Greek tēle, meaning “far,” and skopos, meaning “observer.” A telescope is, quite literally, a device for seeing at a distance. That convention has persisted across centuries of language and technology, where function often defines form. Words built from tēle follow a consistent pattern, describing action across distance: television, seeing from afar; telephone, sound from afar; teleport, transport from afar; telekinesis, movement from afar; telepathy, feeling from afar. Some retained their Greek roots, others evolved through Latin, but the structure remained. The meaning was always embedded in the name.

Panoptes follows that same tradition, but extends it. The name combines pan, meaning “all,” with optēs, meaning “seeing.” The shift is deliberate. This is not an instrument designed simply to look further, but to observe across every available domain.

Where traditional telescopes observe narrow bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, Panoptes operates across all of them. Radio, infrared, visible, ultraviolet, X-ray, gamma. It does not switch between modes or filters. It observes them simultaneously, as a single system. Its reach also extends beyond photons. Panoptes are designed to detect any measurable signal that carries information across space. Neutrinos. Charged particles. Even the faint distortions of spacetime itself, gravitational waves passing through its baseline.

Deployment systems will be reconfigured to launch these units outward into deep space rather than back towards Earth. As they disperse, the distance between them will increase. In interferometry, this separation determines resolving power. Greater distances yield finer resolution. At the same time, Argos will continue producing additional units, expanding coverage and filling observational gaps. The system will evolve through accumulation rather than completion.

The primary challenge is timing. The Event Horizon Telescope and Selescope both rely on atomic clocks to align their observations. On solid ground, this is manageable. In deep space, things become more problematic. Panoptes units will be separated by millions of kilometres, moving at different velocities and sitting in different gravitational fields. Time will not pass evenly between them. Even the most precise atomic clocks will drift, and any signal exchanged between units will arrive delayed, forcing the system to reconstruct events after they have already happened. Argos requires something more immediate.

Max Orpheus presented quantum entanglement communication, or QEC. Einstein had once dismissed entanglement as “spooky action at a distance,” noting that while linked particles appeared to influence one another instantly, no usable information could be transmitted this way. For over a century, that limitation held. Max Orpheus's work disproved it.

As the system’s range increases, so too does its temporal reach. To observe an object one million light-years away is to observe it as it existed one million years ago. At a distance of one billion light-years, the view reaches one billion years into the past. At distances approaching 13.8 billion light-years, observation approaches the earliest observable history of the universe itself.

The purpose of such a mission is not simply to map the universe, but to confront the oldest questions ever asked: where did we come from, and why are we here? Is life the product of chance, or of intent?

These questions have endured for millennia, carried in parallel by science and religion. For just as long, they have stood in opposition. There are those who believe that man is not permitted to look upon the face of God, and therefore should not attempt to observe the birth of the universe. Others argue that such prohibitions are not divine law, but human fear. Science, methodical and indifferent, has eroded much of what was once held as absolute truth. The age of the Earth, its form, its place in the cosmos. Each discovery has chipped away at certainty.

The concern, for some, is that this will be the final fracture. That if the origins of the universe are observed and found to be absent of design, absent of intent, then the foundation of belief itself will collapse. No creation in seven days. No guiding hand. No concealed purpose. Only process.

On Mission Day 1, the first bombs went off.

They were not random. Observatories. Research facilities. Data centres. Institutions that had not merely studied the universe, but had begun to describe it in ways that left little room for interpretation. What began as condemnation became protest. Protest became division. Division became something less easily contained. Communities fractured along lines that were no longer geographic or economic, but ideological. Interpretation against interpretation. Certainty against certainty.

War had returned. Not as it had been before, fought over land or fuel or flags, but over something far less tangible, and far more absolute: meaning.

Hermes, the ship's computer, makes a minor correction to Argos's thruster output and adjusts the angle of its solar array to make the most of what little sunlight is available at this distance.

Max Orpheus and his team departed the ship thirty-five days ago, when Argos's course had brought it closest to Earth during a gravity-assist manoeuvre. Earth travels around the Sun at almost thirty kilometres per second, roughly twenty-five times faster than even the fastest rifle bullets. By approaching the planet from behind along its orbit, Argos could use Earth’s gravity to draw itself forward, exchanging momentum with the moving planet and leaving the encounter at greater speed than it entered. The manoeuvre, also referred to as a slingshot, provided a final gravitational boost towards the outer Solar System without requiring the equivalent expenditure of fuel.

As the ship swept past Earth, Max and his team transferred to a return vessel and the Argos continued on towards asteroid 46610 without them.

Three days ago, they finally arrived back on Earth.